Amazon is kind of like Joni Mitchell. The singer/songwriter’s mere four top 40 hits belie her massive imprint on American music, shaping the melodic impulses, vocal styling and lyrical content of artists from Prince and Annie Lennox to Sara Bareilles.

Although Amazon is the nation’s biggest online merchant, with only a handful of stores, its brick-and-mortar footprint — which still accounts for over 90% of retail sales in the U.S. — is virtually nonexistent.

Yet the company exerts an outsized influence on legacy retailers from Wal-Mart to Macy’s that are scrambling to keep up with Amazon’s disruptive innovations, which have helped redefined what consumers expect of the shopping experience.

While much has been said about what Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market will do for the nascent online grocery business, where e-commerce accounts for only 2% of sales, the purchase signals something more radical.

Deflationary food prices, cheaper upscale organic fare from the likes of Wal-Mart, as well as more affordable, differentiated groceries from European entries Aldi and Lidl have been a boon for food shoppers, but a sales-and-profit-eroding headache for supermarket retailers, while dulling Whole Foods’ upscale edge.

Amazon will surely upend Whole Foods’ business and the $700 billion grocery industry at large, by bringing its massive merchandise selection, pricing precision and product-delivery smarts to a sector that hasn’t changed much over the decades.

For one, Amazon brings price credibility to the equation. In the era of digital shopping, consumers have a notion that scientific pricing is “fair,” according to a new study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of retail price optimization firm Revionics. So much so, that the use of science-based pricing technology to meet customers’ expectations is critical, the study found.

By contrast, “pricing based solely on the merchant’s judgment across thousands of items and hundreds of locations inevitably appears arbitrary and unfair.”

Amazon is a master at “dynamic pricing” that’s powered by its proprietary algorithms. This born-in-the-web technology enables retailers to reprice thou­sands of items based on consumer demand, buying behavior, competitors’ pricing, and market factors. And it’s granted Amazon an edge over legacy retailers, which largely still rely on manual and intuitive—rather than data-driven—pricing strategies that predate the era of price transparency, whereby shoppers can compare the cost of most any product in seconds from their smartphones.

Indeed, it takes Amazon two minutes to make a price change, compared with 43,000 minutes, or just under a month, for a U.S. e-commerce site, according to retail pricing technology firm Intelligence Node. And the U.S. offline market averages 270 days to make the change, a sluggishness that is costing retailers sales. Stay tuned for how Amazon’s dynamic pricing smarts will inform Whole Foods’ pricing strategy.

Food Styling A La Amazon

Then there’s the question of product mix. Although Wal-Mart is the nation’s biggest retailer, Amazon dwarfs its product selection. Wal-Mart sells about 17 million products, a pittance compared to Amazon’s 357 billion, according to ScrapeHero. Put another way, Wal-Mart sells a mere 4.7% of the products that Amazon does.

Of course, seemingly limitless assortments aren’t necessarily desirable on retail store shelves, evidenced by the paradox of choice, when more is actually less. But just how Amazon can leverage its vast merchandise resources and network of third-party sellers— married with its unrivaled customer data — inside Whole Foods 400-plus stores is something to keep an eye on.

If any retailer is able to find new, meaningful ways to monetize and incentivize shoppers’ idiosyncratic grocery purchases — in my case, Cento tuna, baby spinach and Jujyfruits are a few staples — Amazon is. Perhaps a Whole Foods product display featuring items that other shoppers of fancy-canned tuna buy, pulled together with customer reviews and recipes?

Can Amazon Solve The Bricks And Clicks Grocery Problem?

Traditional retailers have been on a frantic tear to make brick-and-mortar shopping as convenient as online shopping.

That preoccupation has seen its expression in efforts to create a seamless experience between their stores and e-commerce channels with the expansion of buy online, pickup in-store perks and curbside pickup of e-commerce orders, for example. Wal-Mart is even experimenting with store employees making merchandise deliveries to shoppers on their way home from work.

While getting consumers who buy online into a store holds the promise of add-on sales, digitally touched orders are largely a profit-draining exercise for brick-and-mortar retailers.

Bringing the convenience of digital shopping to the grocery business is that much trickier as the delivery of perishables like fresh food is complex.

And it now has something it’s never had to pull that off: It has 460 stores to play with.

Legacy retailers have long been quick to note that no matter how much market share Amazon gains, their own fleet of physical stores grants them an advantage that eludes the online giant. Now that’s no longer the case.